Book Review: BETTER: A MEMOIR ABOUT WANTING TO DIE by Arianna Rebolini
Arianna Rebolini Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die HarperCollins / April 2025 / 352 pp / $30 Hardcover Reviewed by Hope...| Good River Review
Arianna Rebolini Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die HarperCollins / April 2025 / 352 pp / $30 Hardcover Reviewed by Hope...| Good River Review
August 14, 2025 by Whitney Collins, fiction faculty Back in the 1900s, when my friends and I were growing up relatively unplugged and easily entertained, we often played Mad Libs, a word game that prompted players to fill in the blanks of a half-completed story with random nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The result was always a creative and non-sensical tale that illustrated the power of word choice and surprise. Fast-forward to the early 21st century, when I was no longer playing Mad Libs but| Good River Review
EXCITING NEWS & UPDATES FROM SPALDING'S NASLUND-MANN SCHOOL OF WRITING STUDENTS, ALUMNI, FACULTY & STAFF Students Colleen Alles ’s ...| Good River Review
The fall 2025 edition of Spalding’s Business of Writing Seminars takes place 10:30 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. ET Saturday, September 6, for...| Good River Review
by Kathleen Driskell, Chair, Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing In less than two months, Naslund-Mann students and alumni will...| Good River Review
July 24, 2025 By Greg Pape, poetry faculty On the hottest day of the year, the poetry workshop of the Spalding MFA summer residency program met on the fourth floor of a building near Kyoto Station in a room with no windows. I had prepared a talk on Bashō and read from The Narrow Road to the Deep North, translated by Noboyuki Yuasa. Bashō came to Kyoto as a young man after the death of his friend Yoshitada. Yuasa tells us not much is known about the next five years of Bashō’s life. “It...| Good River Review
Martín EspadaJailbreak of SparrowsAlfred A. Knopf / 2025 / 114 pp / $29 HardbackReviewed by James Long / June 2025 About a third of the way through his new collection, in a poem titled “The Critic’s Tongue Did Not Sparkle with the Diamond Stickpin of Wit,” Martín Espada shares this chilling exchange from a highbrow dinner conversation: Puerto Ricans? You’ve got a drug problem. Here’s how you fix it. Deport the drug dealers. Deport the addicts. Deport anyone who won’t talk to ...| Good River Review
EXCITING NEWS & UPDATES FROM SPALDING'S NASLUND-MANN SCHOOL OF WRITING STUDENTS, ALUMNI, FACULTY & STAFF Students Colleen Alles (P)...| Good River Review
June 12, 2025 By Larry Brenner, faculty, writing for TV, screen, and stage In our conversations on the Once Upon a Disney podcast, my co-host Andie Redwine and I had a discussion of who we thought the true villain of Peter Pan (1953) was. While the obvious answer is Captain Hook, I’ve always read Peter Pan as having a more subtle, sinister force operating behind the scenes. I recently revisited this conversation as we are preparing our book—working title Write Like a Mouse: Analyzing Di...| Good River Review
May 22, 2025 By John Pipkin, fiction faculty One concern that I often hear about delivering critiques in workshop (especially from my undergraduate students) is a version of the question “What if I’m wrong?” or “How do I know if I’ve read the piece correctly?” These are understandable concerns, especially in the semi-public forum of the writing workshop, where you not only need to have a concrete opinion, but you also have to say it out loud in front of other writers and then st...| Good River Review
May 8, 2025 by Leah Henderson, writing for children and young adults faculty On any given day, I hear or read a new article, blog post,...| Good River Review
For the second half of the Summer 2025 virtual residency, students will participate in a faculty-led, special-topic, mini-workshop that...| Good River Review
April 23, 2025 by Nancy McCabe, creative nonfiction and fiction faculty Over the last year or so, I launched two books: in March 2024...| Good River Review
Each day it seems our country is shrinking further in its capacity to feel and express compassion for our neighbors. In the midst of...| Good River Review
Roisín O’Donnell Nesting Algonquin Books / February 2025 / 400 pp / $29.00 Hardcover Reviewed by pine breaks / April 2025 Nesting is...| Good River Review
by Jennifer Choi the weather of snakes that afternoon, grandma was folding the laundry as she crawled into my uncle’s pajamas,...| Good River Review
by Barbara Daniels Drinking Gin by the Back Bay Lift your cold glass. Look through the gin at my unsmiling face. If everything is...| Good River Review
by Colleen S. Harris Lessons From a Baptism They told me to raise my arms and sing the lake into a flowing calligraphy. I...| Good River Review
by Nicolas Visconti A halo in thin air A halo in thin air. Laurent, after the wreck, I never allowed myself to learn all the names...| Good River Review
by David Kirby The Simplest Language Possible As Mr. Tsutomo Yamaguchi steps off a streetcar in Hiroshima...| Good River Review
